1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of user interface controls and more particularly, to a drop-down box control.
2. Description of the Related Art
The conventional graphical user interface (GUI) has been widely used for many years. The primary function of the GUI includes providing user interface controls with which the end-user can interact with an underlying application. The common GUI includes many stock user interface controls, most of which, when combined, can accommodate most computer-human interactions required by an application. For example, the static text box control can be used to present text to the end-user while an edit box can permit the user to provide textual input to the application. A radio button control can provide for the exclusive selection of an element from among a field of elements, while a checklist box can control can provide for the non-exclusive selection of elements from among a field of elements.
The conventional drop-down box is a well-known GUI control in which an end-user can select an entry from among a set of entries stored in association with the drop-down box. Advantageously, though, in the nominal state, only one entry may be visible at any one time, while the remaining entries in the set remain hidden from display. Only upon activating a region of the drop-down control will the remainder of the set of entries be displayed in a “drop-down” fashion. Hence, this type of control can conserve valuable display space when not in use. Nevertheless, the conventional drop-down box control suffers from several inherent deficiencies.
First, in a conventional drop-down box control, the set of entries are static in nature and cannot be changed dynamically by the end-user. More particularly, the conventional drop-down box lacks editable entries in the set. Rather, the end-user must select one or more of the entries already defined in the set of entries. Also, the width of the drop-down box control varies proportionally to the widest width of the text of any one entry in the set of entries. Accordingly, the advantage of conserving screen real estate can be lost upon a very wide set of entries. Finally, the conventional drop-down box is truly static in nature and cannot undertake computational operations based upon the selected entries in the set of entries. In consequence, though useful in and of itself, the conventional drop-down box can be limited in use.
Complex variations of drop-down boxes exist in most “Windows” applications, but the same cannot be said of pure hypertext markup language (HTML) based GUI applications. Yet, as many UNIX and Windows GUI applications are transformed to Web applications, it will become important to implement complex combination controls using markup language and embedded scripts only in order to provide end-users with the same convenient interactive experience which otherwise would be expected in a desktop, stand-alone execution application.
As an example, HTML provides many different types of GUI controls for inputting text. Yet, on certain occasions, it would be convenient for an end-user to select an entry from a set of entries, while maintaining the ability to add a new entry. For instance, a typical time control can offer the end-user the ability to choose a standard time such as “11:00 AM” from among a listing of pre-established times. Still, the typical time control cannot concurrently permit the end-user to directly specify a time not included in the listing of times within the control. In that regard, what is an end-user to do when the end-user intends upon selecting a time of “11:05 AM”, though “11:05 AM” is not included as a specified time in the drop-down control?